RAPID: Kilauea 2020

Kilauea volcano began a new phase of eruption on Dec. 20th, 2020 after ~1.3-years of repose. The beginning of the current eruption was fairly low risk to the community but that could change quickly, as it did in 2018. One factor that could help forecast if this eruption might transition into a higher risk eruption is the amount of hot, gassy, and crystal-poor magma that is reaching the surface.

If the magma is colder, more crystalline, and degassed this suggests that the eruption is more likely to end soon. However, if researchers detect a change in the gas or crystal content during these early stages of the eruption, they can assume this means the magma chamber is producing new, hot and gassy magma instead of erupting old, degassed and crystal-rich magma.

This project will sample volcanic gas and estimate the crystal content in an attempt to characterize the deep magma feeding this eruption as old (lower risk) or new (higher risk).

The project will conduct investigations on the 2020 eruption at the Kilauea summit with the goal of capturing and correlating changes in the crystal content of the lava and gas geochemistry. The researchers will use one tried-and-tested method and one experimental method to build a dynamic picture of the early stages of this eruption through 1) gas collection, and 2) hyperspectral imaging.

With these techniques, they will constrain the carbon isotope ratio of the gas (an indicator of young, fresh magma), the crystal content (an indicator of stagnated, older magma), and the eruption vigor. The potential contribution of this project is to inform the forecast of the likely behavior of the current activity as well as develop a new remote method which may lead to real-time crystal contents during an eruption. These values would be useful for lava flow modeling which helps civil defense plan evacuations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.